Tag Archives: New Reality

Just now world leaders are telling us it’s time to close our borders and load our guns. With all the loonies and radicalized nut-jobs out there, we need to make security our highest priority. Inside our own nation, subgroups are putting tribal loyalty above the common good, as political parties, religious sects, and social classes antagonize each other. The media keep streaming to our screens images and stories of police brutality, hate crimes, and seemingly random massacres, promoting the view that everything is falling apart.

Other voices such as Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress), Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow), and Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think) are trying to help us out of this fixation on the negative by presenting actual data as evidence of the fact that not only is everything not falling apart, but some very important things are coming together for a brighter picture.

Far fewer people today die from famines, epidemics, or human violence than at any time in history. Breakthroughs in science and technology, while they probably won’t save the world, are making it possible for more people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives. Climate change notwithstanding, most of the major concerns on our global horizon are solvable as long as we can work together for the good of all.

And yet, getting along and working together is where we often run into trouble. If we could work together for the greater good, perhaps nothing would be impossible. But certain people are intent on throwing wrenches in the gears – poking our insecurities and curating our worst fears by distorting facts, spinning stories, and making up shit to make us believe that things are really, really bad.

A few of these crazymakers are just plain crazy, while most of them do it because they stand to benefit from our emotional reactions and irrational behavior. What will they get out of it? Power, control, financial profit, real estate holdings, fifteen minutes on TV or forever in heaven. Who knows? Their challenge in any case is getting us to believe things that aren’t really true.

When the stress of daily life has us reeling off center and out of our depths, we are vulnerable to negative thinking. We are just where they want us.

Rather than closing our eyes to the very real troubles around us or falling for the doomsday scenarios of emotional terrorists (including many politicians, preachers, and self-styled prophets), I propose that we momentarily detach our focus from this or that symptom and open our frame to a much (very much!) wider horizon. Oftentimes the upheavals we experience in life cannot be understood by analyzing only the local conditions and direct causal connections among things.

Indeed, the most important factors are systemic ones – broader dynamics, delayed effects, and feedback loops that cycle over many months, years, and even (as I’ll suggest) evolutionary eras.

Our ability to take in the bigger picture and longer view on things is compromised by the sense of urgency whipped up by those emotional terrorists mentioned earlier. With the right rhetoric and charismatic flair they can incite us to act without any concern over the larger and later consequences of our action.

This is when it’s critical that we each find our center, close our eyes, take a few deep breaths, and then open our eyes again to what might really be going on.

My diagram presents a scheme of the biggest of big pictures and longest of long views. The structure of our universe has been evolving for nearly 14 billion years: starting in a quantum flaring-forth (the so-called “big bang”), condensing into matter, stirring to life, waking as mind, and bending reflexively upon itself in the self-conscious ego.

And here we are, the universe contemplating itself. In our ego conceit we might believe that self-consciousness is the endgame, the ultimate aim of the whole shebang.

But not so.

A self-conscious personality is instead a penultimate phenomenon in the evolution of our universe, and like most things which are transitions or progression thresholds to something else (or something more), it is inherently unstable. The human personality needs to connect with other personalities in order to maintain a balance between its subjective needs and the social environment. An individual ego emerges out of this reciprocal exchange with other egos, and it continues to lean on others in the construction of identity.

Because every ego wrestles to some extent with insecurity over our subjective need to feel safe, loved, capable, and worthy (for more on the feeling-needs see A New Hierarchy of Needs), we can lean into relationships with unrealistic expectations, which inevitably leads to disappointment, resentment, and distrust. It’s this emotional insecurity that gets exploited by those with ulterior motives.

In truth, emotional terrorists are themselves deeply insecure and are compensating for their unmet needs to feel safe, loved, capable, or worthy by manipulating us and others around them.

The big picture suggests, then, that our current global situation is on the brink of evolutionary change – literally a transformation in our very nature as human beings. For the past several millenniums we have been oriented in reality by the separate center of personal identity known as ego (my “I” and your “I”).

As new technologies in transportation, communication, and production have been steadily shrinking the distances between us, the elevated stress of this congested environment on our developing identities has made us more anxious, reactive, and increasingly aggressive with each other. We might say that while the infrastructure for supporting the next leap in our human transformation has been coming together over the centuries of progress, our neurotic insecurities and convictions keep holding us back and pulling us down.

Beyond the self-conscious ego lies a further frontier of our communal spirit – that is to say, of the inner aim in our nature to connect in creative partnerships and empathic communities. Throughout the Egoic Era this higher ideal of human nature has been represented in the virtues of deities who are exalted in worship and imitated in the moral aspirations of devotees.

In my diagram I have placed this “evolutionary ideal” inside a thought bubble, referencing the various ways it has been imagined and represented in art, myth, and theology. By definition, the ideal doesn’t have objective existence. The gods are not literal beings, but literary figures exemplifying the waking virtues of our higher self.

Our ability to make the leap where we begin to internalize and live out what we had earlier only imagined and worshiped in the ideal is dependent on our willingness to let go of beliefs, of the attachments that anchor them, and of the insecurities inside our personality that keep us so self-involved.

Dropping away from ego (illustrated in my downward arrow) we enter the grounding mystery of our existence – also named our “existential ground” or ground of being. With each descending level awareness opens to a larger horizon: from “just me” and other egos, to that of all sentient minds, to the still larger web of life and its physical foundations, and out to the ultimate horizon of the universe itself where all is one.

Coming back up from these mystical depths to our personal identity, we arrive with the realization that we are what the universe is presently doing, and that our next step is one of moving outward in self-transcendence for the sake of joining with others in celebration of our One Life together.

Life in community isn’t always easy, and conflicts will arise from time to time. But with the shared vision of its New Reality before us, we can take at least three steps forward.

There are a lot of highly concerned and rational people today who are being held back from stepping out, speaking up, and taking the lead into a better future for our planet. It’s not exactly that someone else is holding them back, even though that’s how many would try to rationalize their current situation. We’d like to think there is someone over there who is keeping us in our frozen state, and that if only they will leave us alone we will be happy.

This turns out to be little more than an excuse, however, because the real cause of our paralysis is internal to ourselves, not out there somewhere else.

I propose the existence of something I’ll call “the fear chain,” which gets forged especially during those critical years of our early conditioning. Parents, teachers, coaches, and other handlers conspired in teaching us that certain things (and people) are dangerous – or potentially so. When we were very young we were cautioned against talking with strangers – along with playing in the street, running with scissors, and touching hot stoves. Such things were “dangerous,” and engaging with them would likely put us at significant risk.

Whether or not they consciously realized it, these influential adults were servo-mechanisms in our socialization, whereby the animal nature of our body was trained to behave according to the rules and rhythms of cultural life. Already programmed by millions of years of evolution, our body came equipped with some basic instincts, the most persistent of which is our drive for self-preservation.

In some form or fashion, all the other instincts – for attachment, food, shelter, sex, and reproductive success – are variations of our primal commitment to staying alive.

This drive to stay alive might also be characterized as an innate fear of death, of avoiding or seeking escape from anything that threatens survival – particularly predators, venom, toxins and tainted food; along with genuinely high-risk situations of exposure, violence, or unstable and precarious environments. While not as primal, perhaps, anything that represented the possibility of injury was linked to our fear of death, since, if serious enough, an injury might very well result in our loss of life.

In this linking fashion, numerous secondary associations were forged and anchored to our compulsive need to live – and not die.

Such association-by-linking should make you think of links in a chain, and this is exactly how I am proposing that the fear chain comes into existence. A primal (and mostly unconscious) fear of death got linked out to situations, objects, and other people who presented a risk of injury to us. And just like that, the primitive energy dedicated to staying alive was channeled into attitudes and behaviors of avoidance, suspicion, and self-defense. From that point on, the possibility of injury started to drive what we did, where we went, and with whom.

This concept of a fear chain suggests that the paralysis many people feel today is a complication of how we have been socialized – not just when we were children but even now under the tutelage of the politicians, preachers, journalists, and jihadists who spin our collective perceptions of reality. In this case, those deeper fears of injury and death get linked to the more normal experiences of loss.

Almost as much as we fear losing our lives or losing our minds, we dread the loss of wealth and opportunity, of time and freedom, of the way we were, or what we thought we could accomplish and become.

Socialization is largely dedicated to the project of constructing our identity – not what we are as human beings, but who we are as members of cultures, nations, classes, and tribes. This project is carried out through a process of forming attachments to the people, places, things, and beliefs that define us and form our horizon of meaning. Identity and attachment, then, are simply two sides of the same coin, with one (identity) the product of the other (attachment).

If we return to our natural and socially conditioned fear of injury, we can see how threats to our attachments amount to a kind of assault on our person. This is how the fear chain is forged with still another link: the (threatened or real) loss of an attachment is experienced as an injury to our identity, which anchors still farther down into our instinctual fear of death.

The stronger the attachment – that is, the more central it is to who (we think) we are – the more we fear losing it.

I wonder if the fragile construct of our identity – so many attachments, so much dependency – is what makes us so afraid of failure these days; of not being ‘successful’ or ‘good enough’. If we should try but fail, we run the risk of losing some aspect of who (we think) we are, suffering injury to our personal identity and (we irrationally believe) putting ourselves in peril of death itself. When a desired outcome isn’t achieved or we can’t get something perfect the first (or fiftieth) time, who we are and our place in the world is called into question. It’s best not to try, which allows us to keep the fantasy of identity safely above and ahead of us without the risk of being proven wrong.

Those who seek to generate an anxious urgency in us will typically use a narrative of terror to motivate us in the direction they want us to go. Such rhetoric is common from fundamentalist pulpits and during political campaigns, not to mention from those extremist wack jobs who seek to panic, disrupt, and destroy the life routines of innocent citizens. They are all united in their determination to unsettle us, tapping our amygdalas with messages of panic, outrage, and paralysis – the flight, fight and freeze responses hardwired into our brain circuitry.

For the relatively disengaged citizenry of liberal democracies, freezing is the majority option: we stop, stare, hold our breath and shake our heads, waiting for the stupor to pass before crawling back into our rut of life-as-usual.

My theory is that these narratives of terror are the sociocultural counterpart of the fear chain, one shaping the environment of our collective life and the other priming our nervous system for survival in ‘dangerous’ times. Even though a drive to survive and the fear of death may be instinctual, our chronic anxiety over losing ourselves – of losing who (we think) we are, along with the illusion of security and control that holds us together – is entirely conditioned and not natural at all.

Indeed, the intentional release of this bundle of nerves and dogmatic convictions is the Path of Liberation as taught in the wisdom traditions of higher culture.

The question remains as to how we might effectively transform our Age of Anxiety into a Kindom (sic) of Peace, where we love and honor the whole community of life on Earth. Years ago Paul Tillich coined “the courage to be” as the high calling of our human adventure. In defiance of the narratives of terror and breaking free of the fear chain, we can step out and speak up, investing our creative authority in the New Reality we want to see.

It will take more than just a few brave souls. And it will require that we move out of complacency, through protest, into a very different narrative.